The Stars' Lament [Hadrian]

[Hadrian]

"No. No, I'm just not very good at being social. Sometimes I worry that I'm giving off the wrong impression... and misread those of others. I didn't have many friends in Zeltiva because of this... but it is beautiful there. The University is wonderful. One can learn almost anything there. You should consider going someday. I'm sure you'll make friends faster than I did." He considered the strange young man. Well, everyone was strange to Hadrian. His eyes unfocused for just a moment as they realigned to take in the Auristic spectrum as well as the normal visual spectrum, trying to figure out from what he saw why it felt like he was missing something or Seven was holding something back. Perhaps that was inevitable. "What did you and Kendall... er, Ken... talk about? If you don't mind me asking."

[Seven Xu]

Seven seemed to relax knowing that Hadrian was merely socially awkward. A relieved smile graced his face and the look of worry melted. "That makes two of us, although I think we have already discussed how we both suck at people." The smile evolved into a grin and a light breath dissolved the steam that rose from his aromatic tea.

"Kendall?" He repeated, then gave a short, compliant nod. "I don't mind you asking. Besides, I was sort of abrupt and rude in bringing him up - for that, I apologize." Seven hung his head momentarily in thought, distracting himself by the floral pattern on his china mug. After he settled again, Seven crossed his legs at the thigh and leaned back in the rickety wooden chair. "I ran into him on my first day here - in the most literal sense." A pause, and a short laugh at his own expense. "After he helped me pick up my belongings, we began to talk and eventually ended up at the Rearing Stallion. I would have practiced a little more discretion, had I known Kendall was going to drink so much he passed out."

Seven felt the urge to apologize, though he simply continued with his story. A hand reached across the table and sifted through a short pile of paper. A wrinkled page much thinner and smaller than the heavy parchment he used to illustrate his map was retrieved, with scrawling handwriting that would be familiar to Hadrian. It was a poem. "He talked a lot about Zeltiva, his university, and of course, would make mention of you - only once by name, though." Seven paused again to examine Hadrian, unsure of whether or not the topic was making him uncomfortable.

[Hadrian]

Hadrian didn't know quite what to make of Seven after all this, though he was assured by the young man's aura that he meant the enchanter no harm. He tried to relax, smiling ruefully at his repetition. "Well, that makes me doubly awkward, doesn't it? Anyway, you're lucky to meet Ken; he's a good man. He does have troubles, though..." He didn't know how many of them had spilled out when they were out drinking together, and he didn't want to breach the trust they had between them by saying too much. Even if Kendall had. Well, might have. As for what Kendall might have said about Hadrian, he was fortunate for once that no blush gave him away on the fair canvas of his face. It would be a complicated thing to explain Kendall the girl with whom he had been infatuated and Ken the man who managed to maintain that fascination despite the change in shape. "I hope you had fun," he said, then, quickly, "so show me these star maps."

[Seven Xu]

Doubly awkward? Hardly, Seven inwardly rolled his eyes. Little did Hadrian know the half-blood was merely grasping desperately for conversation, and held little bias on what type of flesh the man preferred. Kendall seemed nice enough, a tad on the feminine side, but who was he to judge? Seven could be accused of the same - emotional, fragile, easily shaken. He also had little interest in pursuing women. Stop judging, he berated himself, his expression twisting. Pale fingers tapped deftly against the wooden tabletop, mind racing as it often did when he allowed it. Even when he tried to calm his head it would get out of hand; thoughts, even the most trivial and mundane would always plague his mind and prevent it from ever being clear. If it were not for that, Seven would excel at meditation - he was great at shutting out the outside world. Unfortunately, it was often a task to calm his inner thoughts enough to get a focused sentence out of the jumbled mess that made up his mind; meditation was an impossibility as long as he allowed his thoughts to run rampant as they did.

"Star charts." Seven echoed, eyes darting upwards again. A welcome change in subject. The immediate realization that his small correction in Hadrian's 'star maps' comment brought color to his face. Despite this, his brows had drifted upwards and beneath shaggy white bangs in surprise. "You are actually interested?"

Reaching behind the lantern, Seven grasped the small stack of parchment between his thumb and index finger, pulling the melange of charts and maps to the centre of the table. "Is there anything specific you want to see? Some of these are not finished, I apologize, but most of them are. I can tell you anything you want to know about them, if you are curious." A particularly detailed star chart sat atop all the others - one he had illustrated during his nights crossing the Suvan Sea. It was littered with various sketches outlining constellations, coordinates and scrawling notes that made little sense unless Hadrian could read Lhavitian text.

[Hadrian]

"Indeed, star charts. I really am interested in astronomy. I've begun to study magical summoning and it relies heavily on astral coordinates. While I can merely memorize those, I would rather understand them." He frowned at the unfamiliar script, but he could read numbers. Mathematics were a universal language. His finger reached out to point to the script, very close, but not touching. He had spent enough time in libraries to know about the damage human oils could wreak upon delicate paper. Nodding to himself finally, he pointed out a star. "Swalden in this direction. It's a world with Memosites, stones that hold imprinted memories. This must be its sun. And... hm..." His finger moved until he was pointing at the coordinates 0012926672185630. "Do you know the name of this world?"

[Seven Xu]

Seven perked as Hadrian showed interest in his charts, leaning forward in his wooden chair. It creaked as it tipped forward into its front legs and Seven's arm swept across the tiny ink blots, scribbled Lhavitian, and scattered coordinates that made up the map. "That?" His eyes focused on the tiny ink blot that Hadrian had pointed out. Unsure of whether or not it was an innocent question, or a test of his intelligence, Seven licked dry lips and cleared his throat.

"That's Shoyden. Interestingly enough, I got most of these coordinates from a traveler that was passing through Lhavit a couple of years ago. He called himself a summoner, although I never saw anything with my own eyes that proved that claim." His brow furrowed, trying to remember exactly what the man had told him. "I believe it was once a military outpost, but it was overrun by beasts. Glassbeaks?" That sounded right, from what fragments of his memory he could piece together. As a young man, Seven often found himself at the Surya Plaza with his father. There, he would wander off and talk to foreigners, much to his father's chagrin.

"Yeah." A confident nod, then his gaze flickered to Hadrian as if he was waiting for the man to tell him whether he was right or wrong. Beneath a self-assumed socially awkward exterior the man seemed intimidatingly smart - intelligent to the point where Seven had felt something he had not felt since leaving Lhavit: a little intellectually ... inadequate. His eyes dipped back to the chart between them and the lantern seemed to flare up for a moment, before it died down again. "You seem to already know what coordinates are for, what do you need help understanding, exactly?" Seven's knowledge on the planets themselves would be limited at best, knowing more of their spot in the sky rather than their attributes - unless he had been told otherwise.

[Hadrian]

"Shoyden," he echoed, nodding after a moment. He knew the name, knew the history, but the books from which he had garnered most of his knowledge of summoning had assumed the coordinates were common knowledge, and from what he understood, they were common knowledge among summoners. Unfortunately, the self-taught had to find learn those things that had been considered unnecessarily detailed. And now here he was. "Yes, glassbeaks. Well, that answers that question. I..." He glanced sidelong at Seven, then turned his head so the full view of him was visible, as if he were trying to decide how far he could trust Seven after all. "I was farming for information from Swalden, as I said. I uncovered the coordinates, but didn't have a name to match them. I know of Shoyden, of course. But I'm self-taught, so I have to reinvent the wheel in some ways. I'll probably avoid opening a portal to Shoyden until I can control whatever might come out. "Anyway, I can memorize a string of numbers, clearly. And my maths are good. But I've never learned how to apply them to astronomy." It occurred to him that Seven might not actually want to teach him. "You could give me the titles of good books and I could just read those if you prefer. But I like seeing these charts, putting things into a geometric context. I almost wish I had Ionu's gift of illusion so I could model things with more depth than a page can afford."

[Seven Xu]

So he was a summoner as well. Seven's fingers pressed to the parchment, to the tiny indents that had been made when he had drawn out the points of light in ink. Seven found a hard time hiding the fact that he was rather impressed with what someone so young had accomplished.

"Books?"

Seven's mouth twitched into an apprehensive smile, tilting his head. "Admittedly, I'm as self-taught as you are. What I know has come from stories swapped at the Surya Plaza. My father had one book on the subject, but it was littered with superfluous information on constellations and their lore more than anything. I heard that astronomers knew a lot more about objects in the sky before the Valterrian and most of the information was lost.

"But I have managed to learn to categorize certain stars, and worlds, by their brightness in the sky. See, this here," Seven's lithe finger pointed at a particularly large, hollow circle compared to other smaller stars. "This star is very bright. But, it's further from us than this one." The finger twitched sideways to a smaller, filled-in dot. "You can figure out relative distances of stars from our world by measuring their apparent movement in the sky along two different lines of sight. Basically, the smaller star moves further across the sky in our year than the larger, brighter star. So knowing that, I can deduce that the dimmer star is closer, and therefore much smaller."

Seven's fingers lingered on the parchment, lips pursing thoughtfully. "It's really important to be as precise as possible when you map a chart such as this, because the changes in position are so tiny.

"It's all a little silly, I guess." Seven admitted, "I've wasted a lot of time trying to figure out the things people discovered lifetimes ago."

[Hadrian]

"Ah," Hadrian said, nodding. "I'm sorry. I thought you might not really want to teach me about this, that you were just being polite. I was trying to give you an out." He paused, quiet, to listen to Seven's talk of relative distances and how one could measure movement, velocity, distance, and countless other variables. There came a quiet tension, an excitement within him that one might misread as sexual interest. A light turned on inside him when his intellect was engaged on this level, learning something new. "Yes," he said, then a more forceful, "Yes! I understand the motion of the spheres. I'm still trying to figure out how Zintila is different from Syna, but I plan to visit Lhavit someday, so perhaps I can ask Her personally. There is so much that I understand mathematically that just doesn't fit with the common cosmology." He put his hand on Seven's shoulder with a familiarity that was unlike the common, day to day Hadrian. "It is not silly. Knowledge is food for the mind. Your curiosity is a gift. Don't disparage it."

[Seven Xu]

“I envy your confidence.” Seven admitted with a smile as Hadrian clapped him on the shoulder. The sudden swing from detached awkwardness to candid fellowship had thrown Seven for a loop, but it certainly wasn’t unwelcome. “I would never have approached Zintila to ask such things. I wish I had been so bold when I had the chance.”

A question left Seven’s mouth before he had much time to think much of it. “If we ever cross paths again, I would love to hear of what she teaches you.” The excitement was shared in the halfblood’s scarlet eyes, round with interest. There was no discomfort felt from the mage looming over him as he had shared his knowledge; it was unlikely he would misread Hadrian’s aura even if he had the ability to do so. “I’m often disappointed in how little information I can find on connecting math to the cosmos.”

Hadrian’s comment regarding giving Seven a way to wiggle out of one of the first intellectual conversations he had since leaving Lhavit floated to the front of his mind again. “Oh,” A look of embarrassment soured Seven’s excited smile. “My apologies; if you need to leave, I do not mean to keep you.”